What happens when a woman of colour talks about race in this country? To answer the question, which presumably white people don’t want to ask because they’re too busy debating the more pressing one of whether racism actually exists, I direct you to a particularly sneering review of Afua Hirsch’s book, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. A review by a white British man of a book by a mixed race British woman which, inconveniently for the reviewer, confirms in its sheer nastiness everything Hirsch is saying.
Apart from the fact that this is obviously an instance of a review being cynically co-opted as an opportunity to further divisiveness as opposed to an actual conversation (“I know! Let’s get a defensive white man on this!”), it shows how far we are from a #MeToo moment about race. From, at base level, just being heard. “White privilege,” Reni Eddo-Lodge writes in Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, “is a … suffocating blanket of power that envelops everything we know, like a snowy day.” And like snow, its overwhelming effect is silence: to muffle our everyday experience.
I am, like Hirsch, a British BAME daughter of immigrants from leafy south-west London (which, before you explode with rage at my privilege, still gives me the right to have experienced racism). I grew up on a dodgy diet of middle-class white people’s views on race. The unthinking, confusing stuff that can make you feel oddly complicit, which in the hierarchy of racism is not as hurtful as overt abuse but is not benign either. “But you’ve never experienced racism.” “I don’t even see you as Indian.” “You know what those people are like.” Usually followed, a little too quickly, by “Not you, though.”
I have heard all this, a lot, and it never stops hurting. When we say so, which is why we mostly don’t, we are accused of courting victimhood, being angry if we’re working class and ungrateful if we’re middle class. Over decades, the coded message begins to reveal itself: if you don’t like it here, you know where you can go. Which, lest we forget, is a classic trope of racism. So the more we speak out, the more we claim our legitimacy to do so. Because the fact is, we belong here too.
